"My Nature Piece On Dust-Bowlification And the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security"

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“Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

Last year, the journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece after they read one of my posts on prolonged drought and “Dust-Bowlification.” The article was published October 27, 2011 (here, subs. req’d).

Since six months have passed, I can reprint the entire piece on ClimateProgress (see below).

I sent it to five of the world’s leading authorities on climate change and drought and the hydrological cycle: Kevin Trenberth, Aiguo Dai, Michael Mann, Peter Gleick and Jonathan Overpeck. I endeavored to incorporate their comments, but unfortunately Nature has a 10-reference limit for their Comment pieces so I wasn’t able to include as many references as they suggested or as I would have liked. If you want links to most of the articles I refer to, go here.

I was particularly delighted that Overpeck liked the term “Dust-Bowlification.” He really was an inspiration for me to begin studying this topic many years ago when I saw a 2005 presentation of his, “Warm climate abrupt change–paleo-perspectives,” that concluded “climate change seldom occurs gradually” (see The “global-change-type drought” and the future of extreme weather).

I was equally delighted Nature has basically endorsed this term through its multiple appearances in this article and felt that the overall issue warranted more attention.

Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’. During the relatively short-lived US Dust-Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of families fled the region. We need to plan how the world will deal with drought-spurred migrations and steadily growing areas of non-arable land in the heart of densely populated countries and global bread-baskets. Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.

Now, Dust-Bowl conditions could stretch all the way from Kansas to California by mid-century. America’s financial future and the health and safety of our people are at serious risk if greenhouse gas pollution is not brought under control quickly. The food security of all of humanity is at risk. Denial is simply not an option, the time for action is now.

Here is the whole article:

Which impact of anthropogenic global warming will harm the most people in the coming decades? I believe that the answer is extended or permanent drought over large parts of currently habitable or arable land — a drastic change in climate that will threaten food security and may be irreversible over centuries.

A basic prediction of climate science is that many parts of the world will experience longer and deeper droughts, thanks to the synergistic effects of drying, warming and the melting of snow and ice.

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temp- erature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season. Added to natural climatic variation, such as the El Niño–La Niña cycle, these factors will intensify seasonal or decade-long droughts. Although the models don’t all agree on the specifics, the overall drying trends are clear.

I used to call the confluence of these processes ‘desertification’ on my blog, ClimateProgress.org, until some readers pointed out that many deserts are high in biodiversity, which isn’t where we’re heading. ‘Dust-bowlification’ is perhaps a more accurate and vivid term, particularly for Americans — many of whom still believe that climate change will only affect far-away places in far-distant times.

Prolonged drought will strike around the globe, but it is surprising to many that it would hit the US heartland so strongly and so soon.

The coming droughts ought to be a major driver — if not the major driver — of climate policies. Yet few policy-makers and journalists seem to be aware of dust-bowlification and its potentially devastating impact on food security. That’s partly understandable, because much of the key research cited in this article post-dates the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Raising public awareness of, and scientific focus on, the likelihood of severe effects of drought is the first step in prompting action.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

I first heard of the risks in a 2005 talk by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the Uni- versity of Arizona in Tucson. He pointed to emerging evidence that temperature and annual precipitation were heading in oppo- site directions over many regions and raised the question of whether we are at the “dawn of the super-interglacial drought”.

The idea wasn’t new. As far back as 1990, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenom- enon by mid-century.

Events are starting to bear out these worrying predictions. Snowpack reduction, early snowmelt and a decrease in dry-season river flow in the American West, forecast more than two decades ago, have now been measured. In much of the northern Rockies, the peak of the annual stream runoff is up to three or four weeks earlier than it was half a century ago. Heat and drought — coupled with the greater impact of destruc- tive species, such as bark beetles, aided by warming — have increased forest die-off and the risk of wildfire.

The palaeoclimate record dating back to the medieval period reveals droughts lasting many decades. But the extreme droughts that the United States faces this century will be far hotter than the worst of those: recent decades have been warmer than the driest decade of the worst drought in the past 1,200 years.

And much warmer conditions are projected. According to a 2009 report of the US Global Change Research Program, warming over mid-latitude land masses, such as the continental United States, is predicted to be higher than the forecast average global warming: much of the inland United States faces a rise of between 5 °C and 6 °C on the current emissions path (that is, ‘business as usual’) by the century’s end, with a substantial fraction of that warming occurring by mid-century.

A 2007 analysis of 19 climate projections estimated that levels of aridity comparable to those in the Dust Bowl could stretch from Kansas to California by mid-century. To make matters worse, the regions at risk of reduced water supply, such as Nevada, have seen a massive population boom in the past decade. Overuse of water in these areas has long been rife, depleting groundwater stores.

Of course, the United States is not alone in facing such problems. Since 1950, the global percentage of dry areas has increased by about 1.74% of global land area per decade. Recent studies have projected ‘extreme drought’ conditions by mid-century over some of the most populated areas on Earth—southern Europe, south-east Asia, Brazil, the US Southwest, and large parts of Australia and Africa. These dust-bowl conditions are projected to worsen for many decades and be “largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stopped.”

The concept of drought has not been ignored by the IPCC and other scientific groups; there is even a United Nations Con- vention to Combat Desertification. But the cumulative risks don’t seem to have been fully recognized by the public and by policy- makers. And key questions remain to be answered, ideally in a dedicated report by an organization such as the US National Academy of Sciences or the IPCC.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Most pressingly, what will happen to global food security if dust-bowl conditions become the norm for both food-importing and food-exporting countries? Extreme, widespread droughts will be happening at the same time as sea level rise and salt-water intrusion threaten some of the richest agricultural deltas in the world, such as those of the Nile and the Ganges. Meanwhile, ocean acidification, warming and overfishing may severely deplete the food available from the sea.

What are the implications of dust-bowlification for energy generation? After agriculture, energy generation is responsible for the majority of freshwater withdrawals, and two key strategies for generating additional potable water — wastewater purification and desalinization — are both energy intensive. Future energy systems will need to be low on greenhouse-gas emissions and on water use. In particular, thermal power plants — including nuclear — may need to switch from evaporative or ‘wet cooling’ systems to dry cooling techniques, which, unfortunately, tend to be less efficient.

From an ecological perspective, what will be the effects of dust- bowlification on the global carbon cycle? In the past six years, the Amazon has seen two droughts of the sort expected once in 100 years, each of which may have released as much carbon dioxide from vegetation die-off as the United States emits from fossil-fuel combustion in a year. More frequent wildfires also threaten to increase carbon emissions. And as habitats are made untenable, what will be the effect on biodiversity?

At the same time, drought models need to be improved. They successfully chart the hydrological changes seen in the US South- west and the drying seen at the global level7, but regional predictions can be disturbingly variable. Some models forecast an increase in precipitation for East Africa, whereas oth- ers correctly predicted in 2010 that warming of the Indian Ocean would lead to drought in the region, such as this year’s devastating drought in Somalia. The models need higher resolution and a better understanding of precipitation, sea surface temperature and the effects of vegetation.

Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’. During the relatively short-lived US Dust-Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of families fled the region. We need to plan how the world will deal with drought-spurred migrations (see page 447) and steadily growing areas of non- arable land in the heart of densely populated countries and global bread-baskets. Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.

These predictions are not worst-case scenarios: they assume business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions. We can hope that the models are too pessimistic, but some changes, such as the expansion of the subtrop- ics, already seem to be occurring faster than models have projected10. We clearly need to pursue the most aggressive greenhouse-gas mitigation policies promptly, and put dust-bowlification atop the world agenda.

What does the future look like? Dai laid it out in a 2010 study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Drought under global warming: a review,” the best review and analysis on the subject I’ve seen.

He is in the process of revising his analysis, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be around mid-century for the U.S.

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

Wehner and Dai are quoted in an excellent new IPS News piece by Stephen Leahy, “Action Needed Now to Prepare for Severe Drought.” That article notes future conditions “for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America … are projected to be worse than Mexico’s current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate”:

“Drought conditions will prevail no matter what precipitation rates are in the future,” said co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. government research centre in California.

“Even in regions where rainfall increases, the soils will get drier. This is a very robust finding,” Wehner told Tierramérica.

Wehner’s conclusions are based on findings from 19 different state-of-the-art climate models. His results match Dai’s. The story notes:

“If the projections in this study come even close to being realised, the consequences for society worldwide will be enormous,” Dai said in 2010.

According to Wehner, the very latest projections from the newest computer models that have not yet been published also show very similar results. “At the very least we are looking at severe drought conditions in future.”

Wehner said he was surprised the study received very little media attention, given the serious implications for the future.

What this means for future generations is “a very difficult issue for me to talk about” at a personal level, Wehner admitted.

Don’t you agree that things were more honest when it was known as the ‘Department of War’? Just why does a country that has not been invaded since 1814, that suffered six civilian casualties on its mainland during WW2 (while the Soviet Union and China suffered twenty million and more, each)and which sits, impregnable, between oceans and friendly states, need to spend more on the apparatus of death than the rest of the world combined?

For those who realise the need and expense of adaptation and mitigation, puts and calls on the stock market might afford a way to make it happen. Certainly if one had invested in Beyond pollution at it’s low then monies could now be available for action beyond the yerns. Likewise if knowing a disaster is likely to happen, a smoll investment in a bet on the lowering of company value could reap large funds to create relief in the same area that suffered disaster.
Of course, such a way of adaptation and mitigation could be thought of as charity based and benevolent.
Happy trails.

On top of the loss of food production and diversity of ecosystems, who gets to eat the property losses of homes, infrastructure and lifetime labor investments that must be walked away from with zero resale value? (As if I did not know.) Please help: Stop profits from the pollution of the commons. You will be left holding the empty bag, its given.

Of course, the oil soaked military-industrial-congressional complex (which “incentivises” abrupt climate change) primarily counts money as a good. Since money is really only a trad-able symbol of political power, we seem to be cooking the planet by cooking the books. The basis of true wealth, a healthy ecology and citizenry, is now increasingly impoverished, which indicates the incentives are seriously wrong, even immoral.

Are we wrong to call mined materials “resources of energy?” Have we reverted the atmosphere to a prehistoric state? Can carbonic acid gas from ecologically sequestered carbon kill today’s delicately balanced ecology? Are we dumber than dirt?

An entire western ideology of fossil and uranium powered militarism and “economics by private profit and public debt” seems to be unraveling. As if we are a world of fossilized financialized fools.

Having lived through some of the longest and hotest droughts in Australian history, I appreciate how utterly heartbreaking it is to watch everything slowly shrivel up and blow away. It is not so easy, however, when all you have ever known is that more than enough water comes out of a tap to splash it around with gay abandon, to make the connections between water and food, or to imagine living with a shortage of both.

It is going to take some creative thinking to induce better understanding of this future for those who don’t read the science or CP, ME

I was trying to establish a garden during the drought, in south-east Australia, and over half the things I planted died, especially on those hot, 40 degree Celsius plus days, with the northerly winds howling. Watering is pointless, as the plants just dehydrate, and the water runs away into the parched soil. After a couple of wetter years, it really feels like hard times are returning, what with autumn rains being near historic lows. And, on the balance of probabilities, it will be worse this time, or next.

The terror these predictions force can easily be paralyzing. But paralysis is the exact opposite reaction we need. Fight or flight comes to mind, but the old adage that addresses poses a false choice. For us who enjoy being educated and effective in society, there’s a lot of work to be done.
“Climate Denialism” is coming to a conclusion pretty quickly. Odd tropical storms that should never exist are becoming common. Extreme weather is so normal most people realize they’re watching climate change instead of global warming. But the truly horrific impacts are only slowly dawning on us.
Accepting a future that pretty much condemns most of humanity is not an option. Being afraid is inevitable- already people die by the tens of thousands. Far worse we see our quality of life being affected. And people aren’t stupid – we know it’s going to keep getting worse. Most of us have that common fatalism – it’s inevitable.
Our responsibility then is to fight, in small ways or large. Half the battle is public perception of course. People who feel it’s inevitable may never bother to sacrifice. But people who fight a common enemy will band together effectively and do amazing things.
My question is how to make this paradigm happen – where we fight a war against climate killers. War is a gross metaphor but it seems to be the one that works best. Because we need a lot more people on our side, the side of actively being part of the solution, in small ways or large.

John, the ‘war’ metaphor may work for you but it doesn’t work for me. It exemplifies the fundamental problem that has got us into this mess.

It is the antithesis of everything we need to do which is the banding together you mention. You don’t need a war to achieve cooperation towards common goals – we only think that now because our societies have become so dissociated by being regimented into authoritarian structures which produce inequality, conflict and self interest.

When people come together as equals to plan their shared future, they do achieve amazing things. You are right but no war is required, ME

The Nature article refrains from pointing out specific examples. One example that comes to mind is that US exports of wheat, corn and soy to Asia are both the backbone of Big Ag and a key part of the value of US currency world wide. Crop reduction due to heat in the US would have global repercussions.

“… article notes future conditions “for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America … are projected to be worse than Mexico’s current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate”

The projected population of Mexico will have reached 152 million souls by 2050.

(interesting data source in itself. Oil rich Saudi Arabia which is already a desert nation is expected to grow by 313% to …
you guessed it – 91 000 000 )

Will they migrate to Patagonia or Northern America and Europe or Russia if given a chance by that time ?

Demographically and culturally it is going to be a very different and interesting situation globally. Massive movement of the people. We haven’t seen globalization in that sense yet, it seems, with our still relatively homogeneous populations.
Some are xenophobically and in good christian spirit of love and patient tollerance for thigh neighbour are paradoxically starting to worry about migration fifty years ahead of time! Will they start warring by then? For more litteraturally minded zealots this is what they apparently did at the time of another famous exedus :

Moses told them, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Each of you, take your swords and go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other. Kill everyone–even your brothers, friends, and neighbors.”

Saudi Arabia is most technologically progressive country IMO in the Arab world. And is already living in a sort of desert spaceship powered by petrodollars with amazing homeland skiing resourt and cooling systems for the beaches. But they have also already started to tentetively embrace green technology as well. It is a grave Pity that in a capitallistic market economy of redistribution of resources they can just as soon as outcompete your average poor Somalian at a global grain market.

Love and hate those humans. Adventure is upon us. Some will survive another century or even a couple.

As it seems more than likely that large areas will be struck by drought we need a rapid programme of education in Permaculture to all threatened areas.
Permaculture, sets up plant layers to filter the sun and rebuild soils, it sets up swales to catch rainfall when it comes and keep it in the soil. Some permaculture areas work successfully in the Moroccan desert with 30 or more crop varieties and new setups in the Middle East in very dry areas are productive and low labour in under 7 years.

“Dust bowlification” will become more intense from not just from climate change. Quite possibly a bigger driver in the next century will be deforestation.

Some are fond of pointing out that we have made significant progress in re-forestation in developed nations, without acknowledging that such progress came with rather intense help from fossil sunlight.

As fossil sunlight inevitably goes into decline, I expect the forests to suffer, as seven billion people are forced to live within the Earth’s energy budget: the basic productivity from current sunlight harvested via photosynthesis. And where is most current sunlight harvested? In forests.

It is well-known that forests regulate and maintain rainfall, and that desertification is most often associated with loss of forests. Less understood is that the Great Dustbowl itself was perhaps brought on by the elimination of the American Chestnut in the 1920’s. In many areas, 75% of the trees in Appalachia died in the blight, and it took decades before a new climax forest would emerge, alleviating the dust bowl conditions.

Civilization is preceded by forests and followed by deserts. If we can maintain our forests, we just might dull the edge of cilmate-change-induced desertification.